All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen Page A

God forgive us, we go to the lengths of marrying them!
    While he clung to distorted ideas about his own “poverty,” Esther kept drinking and escaping to Paris and New York. It was not long before he was again seeing Celia Simpson.
    “Darling, darling Muriel,” Esther wrote, “I have missed you so much that nothing could ever convey it to you—at the same time feeling…that I only had to stretch out my hand to touch you…This year has been very strange.” She was referring to the end of her marriage, to the growing economic crisis, and to her parents’ decline. She and Strachey were together in New York in the winter of 1929–30. (Mary McCarthy remembered a gathering of leftist writers that included Esther and Strachey at which he had shocked McCarthy by adjourning to the toilet, leaving the door open, “unbutton[ing] his fly,” and continuing the conversation.) But they spent more and more time apart. When he returned to London, she stayed on with Anna and Patrick Murphy until spring. That summer, he traveled to Russia with Celia and several colleagues. The following summer, Esther toured Germany with Noel and Janet Flanner. Noel drove her old Ford; Esther and Flanner took turns in the front seat. They stayed in country inns in the Black Forest and went to the Jockey Club in Berlin. Noel and Flanner fell in love during the trip—some happiness in the midst of increasing strain. Until the end of Esther’s life, these two women were her family. Back in New York by herself in the late summer and autumn of 1931, Esther held “forth on the politics of all the world” and she had lunch with Secretary of the Treasury Andrew Mellon in Southampton. Her parents had fired most their household staff and put their automobile in storage, Mark Cross was operating at a great loss, and Patrick Murphy’s bewilderment at the Depression was painful to see.
    She sailed to England in early November 1931, but returned to New York almost immediately. After years of immunity from illness, her father had contracted pneumonia, and he died on November 23, 1931. Esther and Gerald, both traveling from Europe, missed his enormous funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Several hundred people, including seventy-five Mark Cross employees—the two shops were closed for the day—attended the service, as did several of Esther’s friends, and Murphy was eulogized by a former U.S. secretary of state. As John Strachey prepared to accompany Esther to New York, Celia told him that if he did not return to England within ten days she would leave the country and never see him again. Deeply unhappy, wanting to begin a life with her, but loath to hurt Esther, he sailed to New York, delivered Esther to her parents’ home, and immediately returned to London, sending Esther a telegram to say that he wanted to end the marriage.
    “The whole thing went to pieces en grand ,” said Sybille Bedford, with Strachey “letting her down, her beloved father dying, then her mother’s illness, the Mark Cross company [in crisis], Gerald being impossible, suddenly no money.” Anna Murphy had collapsed and been hospitalized when her husband died; within a month she had a stroke and contracted pneumonia. Esther, in shock at her father’s death and deeply hurt by Strachey’s failure to honor him—if not for her sake then as the man who had helped make his career possible—kept vigil over her mother, who lay semiconscious for five months, “a living corpse.” She died that spring. Gerald, preoccupied with the illness of his eldest son, did not return to New York for her funeral. John Strachey moved with Celia to a house in rural Sussex, struggled with his ambivalence about divorcing Esther, “became ill with worry and guilt,” and went into analysis. Muriel Draper’s “sympathy and understanding” as Anna Murphy was dying were crucial. Draper and Joe Brewer also tried to broker a rapprochement. Esther “does love you,” Draper wrote to John Strachey,